Democrats Dodge a Bullet in Latest Budget Deal

The democrats have almost run the table when it comes to this budget plan that was voted out today by congress.  It’s a major victory for our side.  We dodged several bullets.  There will be no twenty percent cut in disability Social Security payments come next September.  In fact this budget funds the next debt ceiling through March of 2017 and seems to fund everything till then.  The issue won’t be used as a political football next year.  There will be no scheduled Medicare Part B premium hikes next year.  The government will be selling oil reserves. The Republicans wanted that part.  If you are suspected of fraud on Social Security payments it will be harder to defend your case in court and get back your impounded payments.  Doctors will get a two percent cut in payments on Medicare.  But overall it’s a major victor and John Boehner handed this victory to the democrats simply by allowing them to even VOTE on this provision because the democrats would be passing a lot of house bills if they were ever submitted to a vote.  Meanwhile Shawn Hannity is not quite sure that Mc Carthy is far right enough.  But the right wing must be fit to be tied knowing John Boehner’s parting “gift” to them being this major spending bill which was voted out today.  Again- - the democrats dodged a bullet today.

You know Dr Ben Carson has been rising in the polls.  Now he’s not only ahead of Trump in Iowa he’s ahead of Trump nationwide and Trump’s numbers have actually fallen in a major way.  To have Ben Carson as President would be frightening.  I think he’s some kind of a sociopath.  Of course they all want to increase the military and invade four or five Mideast nations at once, and also cut federal taxes in a draconian way- - not just around the edges.  But they also want to bring the deficit to zero- - immediately.  Dr Ben Carson has pledged that he will not sign any federal budget that isn’t a balanced budget and of course Shawn Hannity agreed with him.  Can you imagine the draconian cuts that would have to be made in the social safety net for this to occur.  We’d see what are disparagingly knows as “entitlement programs” as we know it decimated.  Literally tens of millions of people could be thrown into poverty overnight.  He has referred to the Affordable Care Act as “as bad as slavery”.  I’ve wondered why people have taken to calling him “Mister Stabby”.  That’s because he almost stabbed someone at age fourteen but got his belt buckle instead, all over some argument.  Carson admits to coming after people with “rocks, hammers, and baseball bats”.  But according to Shawn Hannity his mother sat him down and took away his TV and radio privileges and Ben knuckled down and studied hard and became the brilliant surgeon he is today.  I can’t figure out why the chant a year ago was “Run, Ben, Run”.  Who is this “they” who wants this mentally unstable blithering idiot as President?  Yes, he’s more dangerous than Trump.  But what will happen at the debate tomorrow night?  Will he bolster his poll numbers, or he could just slip on a banana peel.

I had previously concluded that the Shawn Hannity show wasn’t worth listening too and now my belief in that is bolstered because nothing but lies spewed out of Hannity’s mouth today.  They’re never ending.  Hannity has said that the Clinton surpluses ended with the last year Newt Gingrich was in power.  That’s not true.  Gingrich was kicked out of the chairmanship in January of 1999 because “He made everything into a crisis”.  He was rejected by his own party.  But it was in the fall of 2000 that Al Gore campaigned on a lock box fur the newfound surplus.  The republicans argued that ‘This is money the government stole from the people and they need to give it back”.  So much for facts.  Hannity also told the lie that the lowest Obama deficit is still higher than any President Bush deficit.  The truth is that the final year of the Bush deficit was just as high as Obama, and that the deficit since then has been reduced by a trillion dollars and stands now at 430 Billion or something, and they’re no reason why next year’s can’t continue to be reduced further.  Hannity also said that the national debt was 19 going on 20 trillion.  Last year about this time Hannity was saying it was 17 trillion.  We didn’t run up a two or three trillion dollar deficit in one year.  Someone is lying.  There is the FOX news lie called the “Ferguson effect” where police do work slowdowns because now that we are racially conscious and have all these body cameras police are “afraid to do their job” and the crime rate has gone up in a major way in the past year.  I am informed this is a bold faced lie.  FOX news of course lies about global warming and in fact her a guest who said that a new ice age is coming.  They also cling to the story that the warmest earth year was eighteen years ago.  The truth is the earth is getting hotter all tie time and the polar ice sheet is breaking up, like defective concrete and when the whole thing goes there will be hell to pay.  This upcoming election is really a make or break one for the democrats because the Supreme Court hangs in the balance.  If the republicans get control of the executive and elect more than forty or so right wing nut jobs in congress we are all done for.  Already these forty or fifty people largely control what congress votes out.

Persistently low oil prices are putting a lot of pressure on the dividend policies of oil and gas producers. The Wall Street Journal reported that four oil majors – BP, Royal Dutch Shell, ExxonMobil, and Chevron – have a combined cash flow deficit of $20 billion for the first half of 2015. In other words, these big players are not earning enough revenues to cover expenditures, share buybacks, and dividends. With such a large cash flow deficit, something has to give. All four are focusing on slashing spending in order to preserve their promises to shareholders, with dividends especially seen as untouchable.  However, it could take several years to bring spending into alignment so that cash flows breakeven. The problem for these companies is that they were also cash flow negative even when oil prices were above $100 per barrel in the years preceding the bust in 2014. Over the past decade, costs at all of these companies have all been heading in the wrong direction – higher spending on new projects, dividend payouts, and share buybacks have all driven costs dramatically higher. The WSJ notes that Chevron’s dividend bill doubled since 2004, for example, and its capital spending increased by six fold. Higher oil prices over that timeframe allowed for this cost inflation, but the oil majors were still cash flow negative. Now that oil prices have crashed, the deficit has ballooned, forcing painful cuts to payroll and spending for new oil projects.

We had tomato soup for lunch followed by a patty melt with fried onions on it, improving it.  We had wedge cut potatoes and watermelon for dessert.  I’ll save the Shawn Hannity remarks for later.  On the soap opera they had surprise batchelor and batchelorette parties.  Aden got drunk guzzling up a storm and then rambling.  First Bo and Patch have a strong gas leak to contend with when they were loostening some pipes.  They were fixing that and they discovered part of the walls were crumbly and could be gotten through.  There was talk about a secret passageway out.  I did not see all the episode because I was shaving part of the time and out looking for cigarettes.  Richard told me they had already called A through M to line up for money draw.  In a later scene Bo and Patch are ready to board an airplane and the pilot has been mugged or something.  They called “all residents” just before a quarter till two.  At five till two I left off watching DL and went down to get in line.  However I was surprised that the office was locked.  First it was just the screen that was locked and then the door was closed.  David and others came by wanting to get paid.  Glen hadn’t gotten paid yet.  Larry gave me a cigarette.  A bit later on Mario gave me a long short and I was talking on the west benches with Glen and we both went down the hall.  Manuel was in the office talking to Jennifer.  When Manuel was done Jennifer told me to come around the regular way.  There were two ahead of me in line.  Jennifer agreed I had $9.65 or something even deducting the haircut.  I hadn’t brought the Humanna letter this time.  But Jennifer says she received a bill or two she hadn’t opened yet and would not be paying me this week.  I was bummed.  I turned on the Norman Goldman show and he stressed that democrats are on the two yard line just ready to punch the ball in for a score.  He says “Democrats have never been more unified as a party”.

Prosecuting the Bush Administration for War Crimes

One Murder is a tradgedy ;  a hundred thousand is a statistic

Breakfast with the Beatles was on.  They played “I’m Losing You” and played a lot of the Beatle short songs including “Long Lost John” which are the words at the end of the other song.   They played “La –Di – Dah” by Ringo.  The powers that be have stated that the Ringo package from September will not be separated from the political stuff but will continue to sell as a double album.  “Poco Loco” was in my notes but somehow didn’t make the cut.  I was going to remark that this is a Detroit Romulans song, as I believe an unrecognized other song was this day.  John Lennon wants me to have credit for “Mr. Moonlight”, which I haven’t taken before simply because most people have regarded this as one of the stranger early Beatles song with the organ and all.  They performed it at Hamburg.  It may be that “Almost Grown” was Chuck Berry’s last hit recorded before he went off to jail.

Germany was ashamed of having invaded Poland under a false pretext, etc.; but the U.S. is not ashamed of having secretly overthrown Iran’s democracy in 1953 and of having installed dictatorship there; nor of having invaded Iraq and created Iraq’s civil war in 2003, etc. (there are many such examples). America’s failure to prosecute George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for the invasion of Iraq is the most stunning evasion of basic democratic accountability, and raises the question of whether all that’s necessary in order to be a ‘democratic’ dictator in the United States is to lie enough to fool enough people long enough, so as to be able to make it to one’s grave with no criminal record, even if one has, in fact, raped the country that one had led, not to mention destroyed the lives of victims of that country, such victims as the citizens of Iraq.

The soldiers in the American invasion of Iraq aren’t to blame for their invasion — they believed their leaders’ lies, just as did the rest of the U.S. population (and polls show that most Republicans in Americastill  do — e.g., see this and this — they still believe the lies).

Just as with the Nazi leaders, America’s leaders invaded on the basis of lies — not really of ‘intelligence failures’ (such as was their excuse). (The link there documents it.)

But, Germany’s Nazi leaders were hanged; America’s fascist Presidents haven’t been. Why is that?

Is it simply because they didn’t call  themselves “fascist”? That’s merely more lies from them, alleging they support “democracy,” when they actually are imposing dictatorship (such as by fooling their suckers about all of this — as Republicans still  do).

In reality, “Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy,” as the evidence presented there shows — it documents that, to be the actual case. How can there be democracy in a country where the acceptance of lying in politics is bipartisan?

But, even if the U.S. is ruled by a narrow elite of billionaires and of their lobbyists and of their front-organizations such as the Kochs’ Americans For Prosperity on the right, and Soros’s Open Society Institute on the left, lying in whatever direction is necessary in order to get the job done for the elite-as-a-whole, against the public, it wouldn’t mean there’s no need  of accountability for crimes perpetrated by the resulting dictators, in the fraudulent name of ‘democracy’ (which just smears democracy’s justifiably good reputation). Those mega-crimes make lives hell and even end, for thousands or even millions of people — for example, an unnecessary wars’ victims, some of whom are soldiers on both sides, but most of the victims are actually civilians, injured and killed in America’s invasions, none the less. Those billionaires and their agents such as the Presidents whom ‘we’ ‘elect’ (now increasingly often on the basis of lies) get off scot-free. Instead of being executed, America’s evil Presidents — the agents for their own major financial backers, who get what they want no matter how much death and misery they may cause doing it — have peacefully retired to the positions of honored former heads-of-state, as if they had headed an authentic  democracy, when the mere shell of it is actually what remains now in America.

While a President is still in office, judicially trying him for a crime is impossible because he’s the head of the Executive Branch, which possesses the Constitutional obligation to try and to prosecute federal crimes. But once his Presidency has ended, there is no excuse for George W. Bush’s still not having had to face trial on this and many other serious charges concerning his Presidency.

Here is Justice Robert H. Jackson, 21 November 1945 , Nuremberg Trial Proceedings, the indictment:

It is important to the duration and scope of this Trial that we bear in mind the difference between our charge that this war was one of aggression and a position that Germany had no grievances. We are not inquiring into the conditions which contributed to causing this war. They are for history to unravel. …

Our position is that whatever grievances a nation may have, however objectionable it finds the status quo, aggressive warfare is an illegal means for settling those grievances or for altering those conditions. It may be that the Germany of the 1920’s and 1930’s faced desperate problems, problems that would have warranted the boldest measures short of war. All other methods — persuasion, propaganda, economic competition, diplomacy — were open to an aggrieved country, but aggressive warfare was outlawed. These defendants did make aggressive war. … They did attack and invade their neighbors in order to effectuate a foreign policy which they knew could not be accomplished by measures short of war. And that is as far as we accuse or propose to inquire.

The Law of Individual Responsibility:

The Charter also recognizes individual responsibility on the part of those who commit acts defined as crimes, or who incite others to do so, or who join a common plan with other persons, groups or organizations to bring about their commission. …

This principle of personal liability is a necessary as well as logical one if international law is to render real help to the maintenance of peace.

Jackson was a Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, and he was also the Chief U.S. Prosecutor at Nuremberg. He presented the indictment-charge there.

Perhaps when Barack Obama, just nine days before becoming President, said on 11 January 2009, that, although “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” he might have been anticipating his perpetrating as President similar crimes as Bush had (such as Obama has, in fact, done in Libya, Syria, etc.) and anticipated his lying about it, in his own Presidency — his being actually a GWB II. (And, just as Iraq was no threat to U.S. national security in GWB’s time, neither was Libya nor Syria in Obama’s.)

When Obama said this, he was contradicting himself, and it was obvious to any intelligent person that he was doing so, because everyone  is “above the law” if  the government’s attitude toward law and its judicial and executive enforcement is “that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” No crime can even possibly be prosecuted that way. Obama was playing for brutish suckers not only the American public, but his own interviewer, George Stephanopoulos, who didn’t even follow up immediately (nor at all) by pointing out that the President-elect was contradicting himself there: that, in fact, every criminal investigation and prosecution is necessarily “looking backwards,” in order to carry out and protect the law and the Constitution going forward. On that moment, Stephanopoulos exposed himself as a shill, not an authentic journalist.

The U.S. Constitution is no mere piece of parchment with words upon it, located physically at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. It is instead something more spiritual and entirely immaterial, the supreme law of this land, the ultimate value-system for the American people; and all U.S. Presidents have sworn an oath (which is in the Constitution itself): “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Violating that needs to constitute treason, or else we have no real democracy. (We might have a theocracy, or we might have an aristocracy, but we certainly couldn’t then have a democracy.) Making adherence to this oath optional instead of obligatory is the U.S. Constitution’s biggest single failure, which all but invites degeneration into a dictatorship, such as has recently happened; and we must therefore wonder with amazement how America’s democracy had lasted as long as it did.

Obama assumed there that the American public were mere fools. Stephanopoulos, as a professional journalist and not as a propagandist, needed immediately then to ask the President-elect to explain what he had just said, using, this time, non-self-contradictory terms. Leaving it as self-contradiction, as Stephanopoulos did, not only displayed that Obama was lying about one or the other of those statements, but it also showed that Stephanopoulos wasn’t a journalist but instead a propagandist, who protected Obama from further embarrassment. Stephanopoulos instead went directly off onto another question (as if Obama’s statement weren’t the shocker it obviously was): “So, no 9/11 commission with independence [independent] subpoena power?” That entire passage there about this was, in effect, the start and the end of the otherwise lengthy and boring interview with the President-elect. All the rest of it was non-news, but this one passage in it carried very big news (ignored by the ‘journalist,’ and by the rest of ‘America’s free press’) — that Obama was a liar, and that Stephanopoulos was a propagandist, no journalist in any democracy. In a dictatorship, the press serves the power-system, the aristocracy, not the public — not the Constitution, not “We, the People … .”

This is the type of ‘press’ one gets in a dictatorship: power is never held to account for its crimes against the public, in a dictatorship.

Things have continued on like this throughout Obama’s Presidency. On 30 October 2014, The Intercept reported that:

Months after President Obama frankly admitted that the United States had “tortured some folks” as part of the War on Terror, a new report submitted to the United Nations Committee Against Torture has been released that excoriates his administration for shielding the officials responsible from prosecution.

The report describes the post-9/11 torture program as “breathtaking in scope”, and indicts both the Bush and Obama administrations for complicity in it – the former through design and implementation, and the latter through its ongoing attempts to obstruct justice. Noting that the program caused grievous harm to countless individuals and in many cases went as far as murder, the report calls for the United States to “promptly and impartially prosecute senior military and civilian officials responsible for authorizing, acquiescing, or consenting in any way to acts of torture.” …

By refusing to prosecute Bush-era officials for their culpability in major human rights abuses such as the CIA program and Abu Ghraib, President Obama is not just failing to enforce justice but is essentially guaranteeing that such abuses will happen again in the future. His administration has demonstrated that even if government officials perpetrate the most heinous crimes imaginable, they will still be able to rely on their peers to conceal their wrongdoing and protect them from prosecution.

Of course, nothing happened as a result of this report from three professors at Harvard Law School. It had been issued a month earlier, on 29 September 2014, and had been ignored by all of America’s ‘free press.’ This document’s title was “Shadow Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture,” and it unfortunately stayed in the shadows, in America’s dictatorship. You can’t get coverage of such things in a dictatorship. After all: the U.S. is  a dictatorship. So: a report like this can be issued, but it then is basically kept away from the public, by the dictatorship, which includes the owners of the press (and this includes such ‘news’ media as NPR and PBS, which are, in effect, owned by not just the major sponsors but by the government — they’re propaganda-media, much like the strictly commercial ones are).

And this is why America’s fascist leaders haven’t been executed — they’ve been, practically speaking, immune from the law, above  the law. Any dictator is that — above the law — so long as the dictatorship continues (but not a minute beyond such moment in time).

The last thing dictators want is for the dictatorship to end. Because, then, the public will discover that itwas  a dictatorship. And that’s  when dictators get executed — something they of course don’t want, and so keep the lies going to prevent it.

The only possible peaceful way out of this predicament will be passage of a Constitutional Amendment (which might still be possible despite the dictatorship):

“Violation of an oath of office under this Constitution, if proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court under this Constitution, constitutes a felony; and, if the office is a federal one, then it constitutes treason, the penalty for which is execution or else life-imprisonment without possibility of parole. Adherence to an oath of office, under this Constitution, is obligatory, not merely voluntary.”

It needs to be in the Constitution, in order for America’s democracy to be able to be restored.

But more is needed: No democracy can survive if lying is allowed. Especially lying in politics destroys democracy, and must therefore be severly sanctioned. Lying in politics needs to be a felony when proven; and, since the ‘justices’ on the U.S. Supreme Court say that America’s Founding Fathers made it legal, another Constitutional Amendment is needed in order to replace the First Amendment so that lying is never considered to constitute legally protected expression. No one has a right to lie — especially  not in politics, where lying decimates democracy, and anyone who does it is thereby a traitor to his country, never authentically  a representative of it. Without strict accountability against anyone who lies in politics, there can be no democracy; there can be only dictatorship by and on behalf of liars, who thereby become the nation’s aristocracy.

The reason why America is not ashamed of having invaded Iraq in 2003 is that this country is no longer a democracy — no longer anything even close to it. The chief indictment charged in the Nuremberg Trials applies against the U.S. in 2003 and up till today, just as much as it did against Germany in 1939 and up till the end of WW II. The chief difference is that Germany’s Nazi dictatorship ended, whereas America’s fascist dictatorship hasn’t.

What God Requires Of Us

I downloaded my camera so I have new photos for you.  Maybe I should have included the lone photo I have of Patches, the cat.  Maybe next time.  A big part of this essay started out as a letter to Dr Levy.  I think we should think of "God" in terms of a goal of moral perfection.  I believe if we follow these fourteen do's and dont's we will make the world a better place.

First of all I'd like to relate my seven virtues and seven vices list again that's almost identical to the list I gave you I compiled April 2010.   There are a couple refinements.

Here are the Seven Cardinal Virtues

Integrity (Honesty and a few other things)

Bravery

Charity  (Compassion, Kindness)

Faithfulness (to friends and lovers and to your own values)

Pursuit of Justice

Dilligence

Prudance

Here are the Seven Cardinal Sins

Anger (Wrathful Pride)

Averice

Lust (Addiction)

Sloth (laziness)

Treachery

Cowardess

Squandering (waste)

First this list as you talk about "requirements" or "pleasing God" assumes God is a conscious being.   John Calvin and others have five (at least) basic attributes about God and they are

Being all powerful

Being all knowing

Omnipresence (everywhere at once)

Immutability (unchanging)

Iminence (instant contact with Man and God)

I subscribe to four out of five of these.   I believe God is Unknowable on a person to person basis.  God is not a person as we think of persons.  Even the Bible says that the pot cannot say to the potter who made it "Why have you made me thus and so".  I also believe there is a Marcion wall of separation between physical laws or the law of nature- - - and the laws of karma.  St  Paul even spoke of the physical laws of nature being inferior to the "Spiritual laws" I take to mean law of Karma.  One set of laws is not dependent on the other.  Therefore St Paul can say to thank God in all circumstances because circumstances don't relate to "God" per se.  Stated a better way circumstance is no reflection on our personal "virtue".   The laws of karma don't work that instantaniously.  The question arises whether God is "Perfect" or not and I say "If God calls Himself perfect- - and he's bigger and more powerful than us, then we are not in a position to argue about it.

I have called myself an anti dispensationalist, determinist deist, objectivist with utilitarian tendencies.  Since "waste" is on the vices list- - I believe God does things in the most efficient way possible.  Obviously since he's defined himself as smarter than all of us.  Nature can be amazingly efficient.  In terms of objectivist- - this goes to the thing about God being unknowable on a personal basis.  Things can be deduced about God but we can't know Him personally because he lives in a realm or universe outside our own universe- - which is his artifact or creation to begin with.   An objectivist says things have an objective existance we can't necessarily Prove scientifically.  That would be an Empericist.  The other extreme is a Subjectivist.  I am not that either.  These people believe that "Everything is all in our Minds" and that our "mental power" has magical power to affect the world and our Universe.  Under objectivism- - things either Exist or they Don't and they are NOT dependent on our believing in them- - - for their own existance.

I was going to do a "part two" of the letter but never followed through.  Dr Levy's question is "What does it take to please God?"   Let's talk about "What you should and shouldn't do".   You can apply these four rules to anything you do even to the most banal like scratch your nose or stop to get a drink at a water fountain.  First you have to ask yourself if the action violates your moral precepts.  The Moslems have their five way plan for dealing with this.  They have things that are required, things that are recomended, things that are morally neutral, things that you are discouraged from doing, and things that are forbidden.   I would say something like cutting your own son's throat would qualify as something that violates anyone's moral precepts.  I believe that Morality trumps everything.  It trumps Utilitarianism, and it even trumps a direct order from "God" assuming he even exists in a personal matter to begin with.   The second thing is the Golden Rule of "Don't do to others what you would not want to be done to you".  Confucious stated this precept in the negative and I like that better.  The third thing you should ask yourself is "What is everyone in the world did what you are about to do?  Would the world be a better place?"   I think littering is a capital example to illustrate this one.  Fourth you should ask yourself "Am I doing this action on a quid pro quo basis?"   If you answer Yes this is not to say you should not Do the action.  It's just that morally it's superior to do one's actions for the sheer virtue of them and not to expect some sort of pay-off, like Jesus taught.  If you ask yourself these four question and follow the precepts above, you'll be a moral person.  You don't need to confess your sins to God, but you probably should confess them to yourself.  You should pray a prayer of intercession even if you don't believe in God because the other person will pick up on your vibes.  It's the karmicly prudent thing to do.  Some say you should give thanks to God even in the absence of a personal God.  I won't comment on this, but from a mental health standpoint, it might be a good idea.

I supposed they were doing October 1962 from the first piece which was the Cha Cha Cha by Sam Cooke- - but it turned out they were doing 1959.  I think we have exceded the number of hit songs on the radio from 1964.  The record was impressive today.   They played “You’re So Fine” a song heard on XERB.  Then it was “Almost Grown” by Chuck Berry followed by Kansas City and I thought a white guy did that.  “There Goes My Baby” by the Drifters was the next song.  The announcer talked over most of “The Happy Organ” - - another guy I thought was white.  I remember that song from September 1960.  It was “Along Comes Jones” by the Coasters” and then “What’d I say?” by Ray Charles, a song I remember from October 1961.  Mr Gardner talked over about half of this song.  I’m losing my respect for him because he cuts off the ends of songs now.  Then it was “Johnny, You’re Too Young” by Lloyd Price, “Hey - - - Little Girl” by Dee Clark and Say, Man - - by Bo Didley.  “I want to Walk You Home” was the second Fats Domino song played.  The first I didn’t recognize.   They played “You Got What It Takes” and a different song called “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” they used to play on XERB.  Finally, they played "Leave My Kitten Alone" by Little Willy John.  I like John Lennon's version of the song better.

Hillary Might Be A Phoney

OK here is something by Eric Zuesse.   Re-posting it here will keep it on the top of the pile longer than a blog with constant new entries.   I yanked out one paragraph I thought was just a little wordy.  Norman Goldman has really taken to bashing Bernie Sanders supporters calling them lots of new names.  But one must remember not one vote in one primary state has been cast yet and won't be for over three whole months.  Anybody could still win.  The media literally "dictated" that Clinton is up in the polls because the media "told the people from on high" that Clinton won that democratic debate last week even though all of the early phone polls had Sanders winning by a landslide.  People should stop being robots letting the media dictate to them what to think.  Being progressive isn't rolling over and playing dead.  If Hillary is not being sincere in her newly professed liberalism on some issues, it's best to find out now rather than after she is President, like sadly we did with Obama.

The contrast between Hillary Clinton’s stated positions and her actual record, is stark.

The record shows that she actually supports international trade treaties that allow the participating countries to allow international corporations to murder labor union organizers to keep wages down. Her financial backers include many of the controlling stockholders in corporations that shift jobs overseas to lower-wage nations so as to boost their stock-profits and executive compensation (those executives are paid largely by stock options in the companies they run — the more the stock rises, the bigger their pay); and portions of those takes by the top executives and other top owners of international corporations end up in the political campaign chests of conservative U.S. politicians such as of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and virtually all Republicans — i.e., of corrupt or otherwise conservative politicians. But this article will deal only with Hillary Clinton.

She also supports international trade treaties — such as Obama’s proposed TPP with Pacific countries and TTIP with Atlantic countries — that will cripple participating countries’ ability to regulate the safety of products, such as drugs, food-contamination, water-contamination, auto-safety, the environment, etc. However, her campaign rhetoric lies disfavoring such treaties, even more blatantly than Barack Obama’s rhetoric against NAFTA did, when he was running against her, in 2008.

THE TRADE DEALS

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, on Thursday October 22nd, David Axelrod, who is one of President Obama’s chief advisors inside the White House, explained Hillary’s switch, from verbally supporting, to verbally opposing, President Obama’s proposed trade deals. The interviewer noted that, “Hillary Clinton had previously spoken in favor of the Pacific trade deal [TPP], then once the details were out she said she was against it.” Axelrod asserted, to explain what happened: “I actually think her switch of positions on trade was as much a response to Biden as it was to Sanders. She knew that the Vice President was very much tied to the President’s policy and would have to be, and she wanted to head him off at the pass particularly with organized labor.” That separation of herself from Obama’s proposed trade deals effectively killed Biden’s opportunity to win the support of labor union leaders who don’t believe that a self-declared “socialist” such as Bernie Sanders is even electable in the United States. Biden had been hoping to wedge into the Democratic primaries as being the “centrist” Democrat who could pull lots of supporters away from both Clinton and Sanders.

The reason why organized labor is opposed to Obama’s trade deals is that (as will be shown) the deals would allow all participating countries to allow international corporations to hire hitmen to murder labor union organizers so as to keep wages down. U.S. workers would then be competing internationally against workers whose rights to participate in labor unions are merely nominal, not authentic. That, in turn, would accelerate the shrinkage of labor unions in the United States; and this would even further benefit the big campaign-contributors. (Obama and Clinton actually support this, though it reduces the labor-union base of the Democratic Party. The electorate are split between a ‘liberal’ party that wants unions to be weak, versus a conservative party that wants them to be dead.)

President Obama’s Trade Representative, his longtime personal friend Michael Froman, organized and largely wrote Obama’s proposed trade treaties: TPP, TTIP, and TISA. Froman told the AFL-CIO and U.S. Senators that when countries such as Colombia systematically murder labor-union organizers, it’s no violation of workers’ rights — nothing that’s of any concern to the U.S. regarding this country’s international trade policies or the enforcement of them. On April 22nd, Huffington Post, one of the few U.S. news media to report honestly on these treaties, bannered “AFL-CIO’s Trumka: USTR Told Us Murder Isn’t A Violation,” and reported that, “Defenders of the White House push for sweeping trade deals argue they include tough enforcement of labor standards. But a top union leader scoffed at such claims Tuesday, revealing that [Obama] administration officials have said privately that they don’t consider even the killings of labor organizers to be violations of those pacts.” 

Any country in TPP, TTIP, or TISA, that introduces worker-protection regulations which are beyond this abysmally low level, will then be fined by corporate panels, and those fines will become income to the companies whose ‘rights’ (such as to murder labor-organizers) have been violated, under the terms of the given treaty: TPP, TTIP, and TISA.

And that’s just one example of the type of sovereignty (in this instance over workers’ rights) that is being, essentially, ceded to panels controlled by international corporations, under these ‘trade’ deals. They’re actually about a lot more than just tariffs etc.; they’re about sovereignty — switching sovereignty to international corporations.

As the UN’s top official on such matters has said, TTP & TTIP will produce “a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots.”

Here was Hillary Clinton’s past record on NAFTA, her own husband’s trade deal, which was almost as bad as are the ones that Obama is now trying to pass — and Obama’s will cover vastly more nations:

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, an Obama flyer that Hillary was complaining about, quoted Newsday’s characterization of Hillary’s NAFTA view in 2006: “Clinton thinks NAFTA has been a boon to the economy.” Hillary was claiming that this was a lie. Many in the press blindly supported her accusation against Obama here, because “a boon” was Newsday’s phrase, not hers. However, it was she, and not Obama, who was actually lying: Her 2003 Living History (p. 182) really did brag about her husband’s having passed NAFTA, and she said there: “Creating a free trade zone in North America — the largest free trade zone in the world — would expand U.S. exports, create jobs and ensure that our country was reaping the benefits, not the burdens, of globalization.” This was one of, supposedly, her proudest achievements, which were (p. 231) “Bill’s successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA.” But Hillary was now demanding that Obama apologise for his flyer’s having said: “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals.” 

If you want to get insight into the reality of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, just click here and examine that 8 February 2008 flyer from the Barack Obama for President campaign, during Obama’s Democratic Party Presidential primaries phase, when both candidates were deceiving Democrats, but only Hillary Clinton was provably and clearly lying  to them. Here are the details:

Obama’s flyer said: “Of the two candidates in the race, only Barack Obama has been a consistent opponent of NAFTA and other bad trade deals. [Chicago Tribune, 2/29/04]” But, actually, back in 2004, Obama had had nothing to do with NAFTA, except campaign-rhetoric against it in his campaign at that time, to become the Democratic nominee to win the open U.S. Senate seat for Illinois, and his main opponent at that time was Daniel Hynes, the son of a former Mayor Daley machine Democratic Ward Committeeman, Thomas Hynes. This was mere rhetoric from candidate Obama.

As for Hillary’s record on NAFTA, it was (unlike Obama’s) more  than merely rhetorical, and both her rhetoric and her actions had actually supported NAFTA, before NAFTA became so unpopular among Democrats that she had to become merely rhetorically against it. On 20 March 2008, the day after Hillary finally released her schedule during her White House years, The Nation’s John Nichols blogged“Clinton Lie Kills Her Credibility on Trade Policy,” and he said: “Now that we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released this week that [the] former First Lady was an ardent advocate for NAFTA; … now that we know she was in the thick of the maneuvering to block the efforts of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups to get a better agreement; … now that we know from official records of her time as First Lady that Clinton was the featured speaker at a closed-door session where 120 women opinion leaders were hectored to pressure their congressional representatives to approve NAFTA; now that we know from ABC News reporting on the session that ‘her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA’ and that ‘there was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time’; … what should we make of Clinton’s campaign claim that she was never comfortable with the militant free-trade agenda that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of union jobs?”

On 24 March 2008, ABC’s Jennifer Parker, headlined a blogpost “From the Fact Check Desk: The Clinton Campaign Misrepresents Clinton NAFTA Meeting,” and she reported: “I have now talked to three former Clinton Administration officials whom I trust who tell me that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton opposed the idea of introducing NAFTA before health care, but expressed no reservations in public or private about the substance of NAFTA. Yet the Clinton campaign continues to propagate this myth that she fought NAFTA.” Hillary continued this lie about herself, even after it had been repeatedly and soundly exposed to be a lie. Her behavior in this regard was reminiscent of George W. Bush’s statements on WMD in Iraq, and on many other issues.

OTHER ISSUES

Hillary Clinton favored the coup that overthrew the progressive democratically elected President of Honduras on 28 June 2009. And she favored the coup that overthrew the democratically elected (but like all of Ukraine’s Presidents) corrupt President of Ukraine in February 2014. And she favors fracking. (And see more of that here.) And she favors the Keystone XL pipeline. (And see more of that here.) (And here.) And she condemns proposals for a single-payer health-insurance system such as in Canada, and European countries, or else via universal access to Medicare, and she vigorously supports healthcare-as-a-privilege that’s based on ability-to-pay. But her rhetoric, especially after the challenge from Bernie Sanders, is opposite her actions and her long public record on those and many other key issues.

The only issues where her record has been progressive in her actions, and not merely in her words, are ones where the beneficiaries are ethnic, gender, racial, or other label-groups among the general public, whose votes are crucial in order to be able to compete at all  in Democratic Party primaries — plus, of course, gun-control. However, she has done nothing to oppose the interests of her major campaign donors, no matter how contrary they are to those label-groups.  (A more recent version of that, is my “Hillary Veers Left, to Head Off Sanders.” And a link there will bring you directly to today’s campaign-finance results.) Those support-groups can intelligently rely upon her to favor their positions on their specific issues, in practice, and not merely in words. In turn, those liberal actions by her will antagonize Republicans, so that her Presidency, if she wins, will be very much like Obama’s has been, no matter how far to the right she (like Obama himself) actually rules. The “center” will just keep moving farther to the right (no matter whether the American public keep moving toward the left). The same trends that have been clear ever since George W. Bush came into office will continue, in the same directions. Hillary’s husband started some of these trends himself, such as when he introduced NAFTA and when he ended FDR’s Glass-Steagall Act and deregulated derivatives.

CONCLUSION

For a candidate such as Hillary Clinton, a rational voter will ignore her merely-stated positions, and will instead examine, and rely solely upon, her actual record. There are a few successful politicians who are honest with the public, and not merely with donors; but, unfortunately, she isn’t one of them. Consequently, all of the pundits’ talk about such things as “Bernie moving her to the left” is only about her pretense, not at all about her reality. Her reality is what will be in the Oval Office, if she wins.

Reality is only what a politician does  in office, not about mere rhetoric. Even when rhetoric is great, such as it was with Abraham Lincoln, it has relied upon honesty in order to be able to be so. Lying rhetoric tends simply to be forgotten by historians. It shouldn’t be, even if this requires us to remember some very bad rhetoric. Lies can be very important, no matter how bad the rhetoric might happen to be. History should deal with what’s important. So should voters.

Hillary Testifies Before Congress

Today is October 22nd and the long awaited day when Hillary testifies before congress.  I think she may have made a mistake in wanting to testify in public.  Here's why.  Rep Pompino right now is grilling Hillary Clinton trying to make FOX headline news.  And they will succeed.  Shawn Hannity has no end of things to say about Hillary's guilt.  Some of this apparent rationalization Hillary appears to do may be hard to justify to the public.  Apparently no one was fired because of Bengazi.  The republicans say things rhetorically that appear to make sense.   The matter of why so many committees was justified in the opening statement saying "We haven't heard from tons of witnesses".  The democrats respond that there are other witnesses like the head of the CIA who haven't been called on at all.  Thom Hartman is having portions of the hearings.  I turned to the hearings on C-Span live a little after eight, and got a little drowsy listening to the first hour lying down.  The four killed were Ambassador Chris Stevens, Shawn Smith, Tyrone Woods, and Glen Dority.   The Republican leader’s speech made a whole lot more sense than the raging of Elijah Cummings.  The democrats better make more than noise if they are going to show that this committee is unnecessary.  Hillary is speaking right now.  From my vantage point right now the democrats are the ones trying to make this political.  The Republicans only say they want ALL aspect of Bengazi gone into and that no person or piece of evidence is more important than any other person or evidence, just because it's Hillary.

Joe Biden withdrew from the race for President before he even got in.  This is what I predicted he would do months ago.  Months ago I mocked and chided these people like Shawn Hannity just waiting for Hillary's poll numbers to go down, because they won't and they aren't.  Shawn Hannity must have had a cow yesterday when it dawned on him that Hillary would stay on top in the polls and be the nominee.  There would be no coveted "Democratic Civil war" like Norman Goldman talks about with the Republicans.  Biden attacked Hillary or anyone who departs from Obama's legacy, as if he had one.  I wonder if Joe considers the Trans Pacific Partnership part of Obama's "legacy"?  Joe was instrumental in passing that bankruptsy bill ten years ago that makes it harder for ordenary people to declare bankruptsy but for billionaires it's just as easy as before and Donald Trump can go bankrupt four times, but if you're thousands of dollars in debt with a student loan you can't "discharge the debt" by bankruptsy.   Then we have Jim Webb getting out of the race the day before on Tuesday.  I was a little surprised by this because I think Webb has important contributions to make to the party and the discourse even if I don't agree with everything he says.  It shows that democrats can disagree agreeably.  But now if Webb goes and runs as an independent he's in a position to cause trouble syphoning off mainly "reluctant" Hillary voters to him and it might be enough to tip the balance to Marco Rubio or whoever gets the Republican nomination

Weather wise today and yesterday have about been perfect days.  Today is about as close to perfect as you could get.  The rumor is now that Lishia will be returning to live in this place and if she does she'll have the same frictions with Glenda.  My blogging pace has slowed to a crawl.  I write less often and my blog entries are shorter.  Physically I'm in good health.  I still think I might have cateracts that will need surgery and I've been meaning to see an eye doctor for an exam a couple of years now and put it off.   I still insist it would be easier to stop smoking of my psychotropic medications were tweaked a little with a little Zyban or Chantex.   I need to get back into philosophy and metaphysics.  I think the population at large needs to extend their mental capacities.   As you know I believe there are seven cardinal virtues and seven cardinal vices.  One of these involves sharing- - and I believe knowledge should be shared.  As Dr Levy said yesterday if you are a better person and more compassionate and uplifting to others, you make this a better world.

This paragraph is typed Wednesday October 21, 2015, which they say is the Orion meteor shower.  We had lentil soup for lunch.  We had a cheeseburger minus any catsup, and crude potato salad with an orange for dessert.  I went to the liquor store for cigarettes and got them and Glenda called out behind me as I was about to the door.  She and Andrew had ten white cigarettes for me.  That’s about as “paid off” as this debt is going to get.  They had already announced Dr Levy was in the back room.  We did a check in.  We talked about comparative religion at Joe’s request.  In my mind I was composing a letter to write to Dr Levy.  I won’t write him till tomorrow, if then.  Connie and Teresa and also Cathy were in the class.  Dr Levy said he’d probably only be able to make it to class every other week from now on.  It seems a long time since two weeks ago, when the cats were still very much alive.  I thought Dr Levy’s lecture overly stressed the unity between all religions and was kind of a warm, feely, fuzzy kind of presentation.  We had chocolate chip cookies and I had a total of four.  One of them was from Joe.  I watched Days of our Lives.  Aden was planning out in his vivid imagination just how he was going to carry off the murdering of Hope Brady.  It was kind of confusing.  Patch was in the very “safe house” Bo was headed towards, after talking to this Mexican lady.  I began putting away the clothes just before two.  Everything was there.  I missed snack break in the afternoon and sat in the front room a while.   I dozed off during Shawn Hannity and suddenly it’s three o clock and I’m dragging myself out for a cigarette and dragging myself back to the room and turned on Norman Goldman at about 3:12.